Must-See TV
Army Of Darkness
ElRey
5 p.m.
A discount-store employee is time-warped to a medieval castle, where he is the foretold savior who can dispel the evil there. Unfortunately, he screws up and releases an army of skeletons. (tvguide.com)

The [Thursday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

"An enormous cache of phone records obtained by The Intercept reveals a major breach of security at Securus Technologies, a leading provider of phone services inside the nation's prisons and jails," the website reports.

"The materials - leaked via SecureDrop by an anonymous hacker who believes that Securus is violating the constitutional rights of inmates - comprise over 70 million records of phone calls, placed by prisoners to at least 37 states, in addition to links to downloadable recordings of the calls. The calls span a nearly two-and-a-half year period, beginning in December 2011 and ending in the spring of 2014.

"Particularly notable within the vast trove of phone records are what appear to be at least 14,000 recorded conversations between inmates and attorneys, a strong indication that at least some of the recordings are likely confidential and privileged legal communications - calls that never should have been recorded in the first place. The recording of legally protected attorney-client communications - and the storage of those recordings - potentially offends constitutional protections, including the right to effective assistance of counsel and of access to the courts.

"'This may be the most massive breach of the attorney-client privilege in modern U.S. history,' said David Fathi, director of the ACLU's National Prison Project."

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Here's the most immediate local angle we know of so far:

"[T]he massive amount of data provided to The Intercept suggests that the scope of surveillance within the system goes far beyond what the original goals might have been. A 2012 Securus contract with the Illinois Department of Corrections describes an optional product called Threads, branding it 'one of the most powerful tools in the intelligence community.'

"'Securus has the most widely used platform in the industry, with approximately 1,700 facilities installed, over 850,000 inmates served, literally petabytes of intelligence data, and over 1 million calls processed per day,' the company bragged to Illinois officials. 'This valuable data is integrated directly into Threads and could be available at [Department of Correction]'s and [Department of Juvenile Justice]'s fingertips.'"